Alexander Calder Quotes

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

I like to think that my works flow like music. That may be one reason I work in large groups versus one picture of one thing; it's the flow of the whole series that counts.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.

White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge. Bring order to the whole Through design, composition, tension, balance, light, and harmony.

Drawing and composition are the same thing.

My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement.

Because I loved dance, I always need to be physical and moving, so photography that is more tactile made more sense.

I've been doing visual stuff for as long as I've been making records; in fact, for longer.

A lot of cinematography is intuition. It's an art, not a formula.

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.

Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.

Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

I like visual arts, and what I love doing is participating in the making of it.

The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form...I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.

I'm proud of the way I rearrange and put things together, like a chef who makes a great meal, or a filmmaker who puts together a story - it's casting, editing, cinematography.

I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.

It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

I've been playing piano my whole life but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand. I don't have professional pretensions. I've learned so much. So many things I've been doing in the visual, two-dimensional painting world parallel many of the inner working of music - how intervals resolve into each other, harmonic rhythm, tonal things - there's a whole vocabulary that overlaps. Sometimes people see pianos in my works - that I never think.

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.

I never draw except with brush and paint.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.